- Asian American Studies, Diaspora and transnationalism, Goan Studies, Indian Ocean World, Gender and Sexuality, Afro-Asian Connections, and 14 moreLiterature, Portuguese Colonialism and Decolonizaton, Film Studies, Art Criticism, Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Studies, Black/African Diaspora, African Diaspora Studies, South Asia, South Asia studies, Portuguese India, Konkani, British East Africa, and Goan Historyedit
- R. Benedito Ferrão is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary.edit
"So, What Happens when You Lose Everything?" - introduction to Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar (2017), edited by R. Benedito Ferrão.
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eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from arts, humanities, social sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the tropics. Published by James... more
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from arts, humanities, social sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the tropics. Published by James Cook University, a leading research institution on critical issues facing the Tropics. Free open access, Scopus Scimago Q1.
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This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing the tropics. Each article provides a sense of how we can untangle ourselves from entrenched colonial epistemologies and ontologies through... more
This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing the tropics. Each article provides a sense of how we can untangle ourselves from entrenched colonial epistemologies and ontologies through detailed articulations of research practice. Drawing together humanities and social sciences, the papers collectively address questions of whose voices are heard or silenced, what positions we write from, how we are allowed to articulate our ideas, and through which mediums we present our research. In doing so, the contributions foreground the critical importance of these and other questions in any move towards decolonizing the tropics.
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Introductory editorial for "1991: Dispossessions - A 30th Anniversary Remembrance of the Gulf War," special issue of the João Roque Literary Journal (Autumn 2021)
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Introductory editorial for "Goa and its Worlds: A Literary Journey," special issue of the João Roque Literary Journal (March 2018).
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Since 2014, I have been instructing variations of a course titled Portuguese India and its Literary Afterlife. My courses examine how Portuguese colonialism connect(ed) South Asia, primarily Goa, with other parts of the world. Covering... more
Since 2014, I have been instructing variations of a course titled Portuguese India and its Literary Afterlife. My courses examine how Portuguese colonialism connect(ed) South Asia, primarily Goa, with other parts of the world. Covering such themes as imperialism, diaspora, and contemporary phenomena of nationalism and globalization, my classes call attention to how race, caste, gender, sexuality, and other forms of identity, shape subjectivity in various genres of writing. As this essay establishes, teaching fiction about Portuguese India and its diaspora from a postcolonial viewpoint productively destabilizes how students think about national belonging.
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Our reading of the Permanent Mission of India (PMI) to the United Nations building in New York seeks out the influence of the architect’s minority Goan origins in his design practice. By focusing on the Islamicate and Indo-Portuguese... more
Our reading of the Permanent Mission of India (PMI) to the United Nations building in New York seeks out the influence of the architect’s minority Goan origins in his design practice. By focusing on the Islamicate and Indo-Portuguese aesthetics he would have been exposed to, we demonstrate how Charles Correa’s regional influences represent a more complex sense of South Asian-inspired built space in the United States.
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Despite its history as a favored destination for hippies from the West in the 1960s and 1970s, present-day party tourism in Goa largely attracts Indian travelers. This is a product of the post-1990s liberalization of the Indian economy,... more
Despite its history as a favored destination for hippies from the West in the 1960s and 1970s, present-day party tourism in Goa largely attracts Indian travelers. This is a product of the post-1990s liberalization of the Indian economy, coupled with the exoticization of Goa, which has rendered it a pleasure periphery to the subcontinent. Such difference, and attraction, occurs because, unlike most of the rest of the India that annexed Goa, the region was a Portuguese colony until 1961. Goa's Lusitanization suggests a more liberal milieu, social gatherings with music and dancing being commonplace culturally, for example. While tourism has become an economic mainstay in Goa, the party economy pays little heed to Goans and their culture, treating the land as a place where fun is paramount and local concerns, including environmental ones, are sidelined.
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With a focus on two works by artist Karishma D'Souza, the authors meditate on connections between Indian and Atlantic Oceanic worlds, especially as they are informed by Lusophonic histories. The linkages thus drawn include ecological... more
With a focus on two works by artist Karishma D'Souza, the authors meditate on connections between Indian and Atlantic Oceanic worlds, especially as they are informed by Lusophonic histories. The linkages thus drawn include ecological considerations, the passage of enslaved peoples, trade dealings, and cultural ties. In honing in on D'Souza's art and practice, this chapter seeks to understand how aesthetics are influenced by placemaking while also taking cognizance of the cultural multiplicities created through oceanic connections.
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This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectural legacies offered by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s installation series, This is Not the Basilica! (2021). The artist’s subject is the... more
This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectural legacies offered by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s installation series, This is Not the Basilica! (2021). The artist’s subject is the 16th-century Basilica of Bom Jesus, which was built in locally domesticated Baroque style during Goa’s Portuguese colonial era and which houses the remains of the Spanish saint, Francis Xavier. Kandolkar’s work makes viewers intimate with the Basilica’s history, I contend, so as to posit the need for conservation efforts that will save the deteriorating church while also revealing its unseen aesthetic past as a symbol of still-unfolding Goan identity.
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In this photo essay, we offer a variety of representations of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, the structure which famously houses the remains of St. Francis Xavier, highlighting its aesthetic transformations historically. Through this visual... more
In this photo essay, we offer a variety of representations of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, the structure which famously houses the remains of St. Francis Xavier, highlighting its aesthetic transformations historically. Through this visual journey, we intervene in ongoing debates about the Basilica’s appearance, these having arisen over the necessity to alter the building’s iconic look. Such visual education may then hasten its replastering, a restoration that returns the Basilica to its original form and will extend its life by protecting it from climate-related damage.
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The graphic novel, The Destination is the Journey, is Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar’s last published artistic work. It appears in the compendium Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, which accompanied a 2017-18... more
The graphic novel, The Destination is the Journey, is Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar’s last published artistic work. It appears in the compendium Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, which accompanied a 2017-18 retrospective of the same title at Fundação Oriente in Panjim, Goa. That exhibition was the final time Navelcar’s art would be seen publicly while he was alive. Despite his artistic and historical importance, Navelcar is little known in his native Goa, not least because both the artist and his once-Portuguese-colonized homeland cannot neatly be factored into the post-British nationalization of India and its art history. This essay centers on The Destination is the Journey as a fictionalized biographical text to consider how the graphic novel can act as a record of history that does not reconcile with the making of the postcolonial nation-state.
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Born in Portuguese Goa in 1929, trained in art in metropolitan Portugal while the empire was being decolonized in the 1960s, and then exiled in postcolonial Mozambique in the 1970s, Vamona Navelcar became the artist of three continents... more
Born in Portuguese Goa in 1929, trained in art in metropolitan Portugal while the empire was being decolonized in the 1960s, and then exiled in postcolonial Mozambique in the 1970s, Vamona Navelcar became the artist of three continents not solely by choice. At the same time as his work chronicles these diverse locations, these very transits have made Navelcar’s legacy verge on disappearance. As this article argues, it is the politics of nationalism at the three continental sites that constitute Navelcar’s life-cartography that have defined this artist’s trajectory and obscured his oeuvre. Even as Navelcar’s life and artistic connections across the Lusophonic Indian Ocean-world demonstrate the multiplicities and convergences of the region, it is the fixity of nation(s) that has undermined the complexity of such heritage and the artist’s legacy.
This essay uses a sonic history of 1980s music as literary analysis of Thatcher’s neoliberal agenda for infrastructural changes to public housing and broadcasting.
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Dubai, not India, is the location of the world's only Bollywood theme park. Fantasy and violence jump from screen to simulated life at Bollywood Parks Dubai (bpd), allowing for the consumption of film and associated entertainment to occur... more
Dubai, not India, is the location of the world's only Bollywood theme park. Fantasy and violence jump from screen to simulated life at Bollywood Parks Dubai (bpd), allowing for the consumption of film and associated entertainment to occur trans-medially and transnationally. Accordingly, this essay delves into representations of culture and violence, through filmic imaginaries, that link South Asia and the Arabian Gulf. Using Bollywood/film studies alongside area and postcolonial studies and architectural history, I consider how theme parks work as manifestations of the fantastic, suturing cultural entertainment and racialized violence by proxy in a built space. In this, bpd is a site of culturally co-optive consumption and mediation between the orientalist, or re-orientalized, differences of Asian subjects to the exclusion of the occident(als). Focusing on its patrons and its film-based rides, and through research in the digital humanities, such as studies of first-person shooter games, I demonstrate how bpd serves as a mediascape that thrives on the reorientalized fantasy of Indian cinema. bpd thus provides a simulacral space in which patrons may vicariously test the limits (and possibilities) of South Asian-Middle Eastern multiculturalism, as well as Indian caste mores, against the backdrop of neoliberal globalization.
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In November 2020, Indian celebrity Milind Soman posted a picture of himself on social media, which showed him running naked on a beach. He was charged with obscenity. This article considers the time and place of Soman's act over the... more
In November 2020, Indian celebrity Milind Soman posted a picture of himself on social media, which showed him running naked on a beach. He was charged with obscenity. This article considers the time and place of Soman's act over the alleged impropriety. The photograph was taken on a beach in Goa, the tropical setting serving as a pleasure periphery to India which annexed the region in 1961. Accordingly, a longer history of states of undress in Indian advertising, filmmaking, and tourism are considered here to apprehend how Goa has been posited in the Indian imagination as a destination for wanton self-gratification while local realities are undermined. The article thus interrogates what it means for Goa, whose economy is overly dependent on tourism, to serve as a vacation spot during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when, in 2020, it had among the highest number of virus-related deaths in the country (Dias, 2020, par. 4). Using the metaphor of the celebrity who has no qualms about running naked and unmasked in Goa, this article enquires into what such events leave unrevealed in the economic requirement that some locales function as holiday destinations, even in the midst of a pandemic.
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By focusing on the differences between how the designation of a Patient Zero in the emergence of HIV and COVID-19 occurred in Goa, this article considers which individuals and communities attract and are able to stave off disease-related... more
By focusing on the differences between how the designation of a Patient Zero in the emergence of HIV and COVID-19 occurred in Goa, this article considers which individuals and communities attract and are able to stave off disease-related stigma. Goa was where the first instance of HIV-infection was discovered in India in 1989, causing Dominic D’Souza to maneuver his public “outing” into AIDS-activism. In comparison, the first instance of a self-authored testimonial by a COVID-19 patient in Goa indicates a subversion of stigma, but is coded in respectability politics. With particular attention paid to the role media plays in such situations, the role of the state in handling crises caused by infectious diseases is also analyzed, especially as it relates to marginalized communities.
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The year 2017 marked the 25th anniversary of the passing of activist Dominic D’Souza, who succumbed to AIDS-related complications briefly after being diagnosed as the first person in India to have become infected with HIV. On this... more
The year 2017 marked the 25th anniversary of the passing of activist Dominic D’Souza, who succumbed to AIDS-related complications briefly after being diagnosed as the first person in India to have become infected with HIV. On this anniversary, as in the past, D’Souza’s death was used as a platform for gay rights in India, not least because of the film My Brother… Nikhil (2005), allegedly the first in India to depict a gay story. Yet, D’Souza never claimed to be gay, and the film does not acknowledge the use of the activist’s life-story in its credits. Using the director’s admission that MBN was nevertheless inspired by D’Souza’s life and legacy, this essay examines it as a quasi-biopic that employs the struggles of the AIDS activist to champion the rights of middle class gay men in India while failing to represent the larger political ramifications of AIDS advocacy. Alongside this, the essay also recoups the figure of D’Souza as a Goan person to consider what this could mean for the possibility of queer activism beyond the limitations of nationalism.
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Conducted between February and April, 2017, this e-conversation with writer, literary critic, and professor Peter Nazareth engages him in topics of the Goan diaspora, Goan literature, as well as his own writing and criticism. As a writer... more
Conducted between February and April, 2017, this e-conversation with writer, literary critic, and professor Peter Nazareth engages him in topics of the Goan diaspora, Goan literature, as well as his own writing and criticism. As a writer of novels, radio plays, and short stories, and as a critic of multiple literatures, Nazareth is asked to reflect upon historical, personal, and other influences on his work, as well as the reception of it. In his responses, Nazareth draws from familial and personal history as a writer whose lived connections include East Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the West. Additionally, his perspective covers such moments of import as the end of colonialism in East Africa and the Asian expulsion from Idi Amin's Uganda. He is also asked to comment upon the trajectory of twentieth and twenty-first century Goan literature as an early anthologist of writing by those of Goan origins in various parts of the world. In so doing, Nazareth recalls how he came to the work of writers Leslie de Noronha and Violet Dias Lannoy, the latter an author whose novel was published posthumously. Further, the gamut of issues covered include inter-communal socialities and antagonisms, literature and identity diversity, and the fraught terrain of claims to authenticity.
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In keeping with the shift of the modern Indian nation-state to the religio-political right, minority legacies in such regions as the Malabar and Konkan coasts are either being obfuscated or rehistoricized. To prove my point, I employ two... more
In keeping with the shift of the modern Indian nation-state to the religio-political right, minority legacies in such regions as the Malabar and Konkan coasts are either being obfuscated or rehistoricized. To prove my point, I employ two botanical texts from the 16th and 17th centuries. The former, the Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas e Cousas Medicinias da Índia, was written by Garcia da Orta, a Jewish-Catholic converso who lived and died in Portuguese Goa under the threat of the Inquisition. In its efforts to represent its past and present as a modern quasi city-state in line with other Indian metros, the Goan State chose, in 2012, to commemorate the 17th century Hortus Malabaricus, an ecological treatise that, curiously, comes from the Malabar, because among its contributors were Saraswat Brahmins with a dubious connection to Goan history. That this commemoration occurred on the uncelebrated 450th anniversary of the publication of da Orta's opus - one of the earliest printed texts from South Asia - underscores the State's investment in legacy-making and forgetting.
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This essay queries the theoretical position taken in “Between Prospero and Caliban” (2002), Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ seminal essay on Portuguese postcolonialism. de Sousa Santos argues that British colonialism is “the norm [...] in... more
This essay queries the theoretical position taken in “Between Prospero and Caliban” (2002), Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ seminal essay on Portuguese postcolonialism. de Sousa Santos argues that British colonialism is “the norm [...] in relation to which the contours of Portuguese colonialism get defined as a subaltern colonialism.” Indeed, there is little doubt that the writer rightly conveys the historical superiority of British colonialism and the dominance of England over Portugal in the imperial game. At the same time, de Sousa Santos offers the means by which to query distinctions between the two forms of colonialism as they affected Asia and Africa. What is limited in his purview, nonetheless, is the notion of dependency between the two systems and, so, Portugal’s alleged subalternity to Britain. Instead, I delineate how British and Portuguese colonialisms worked in tandem, even as the former system was the more dominant of the two. Further, in analyzing de Sousa Santos’ position on Portuguese identity as being the product of miscegeny, my paper will explore racial formations and the creation of diasporic identities, both, between Portuguese and British empires, as also between Asia and Africa.
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By attending to race and gender as archives of disprivileged experiential knowledge that lie within and beyond the dermis, Margaret Mascarenhas’s novel Skin questions the bounded geographic limits of racialized histories. Skin enmeshes... more
By attending to race and gender as archives of disprivileged experiential knowledge that lie within and beyond the dermis, Margaret Mascarenhas’s novel Skin questions the bounded geographic limits of racialized histories. Skin enmeshes its participants within designs of native and colonial power, wherein violence and displacement are evidenced as pervasive elements of modernity’s onset. Furthermore, because of its inclusion of Africans who are dislocated to Goa, Skin allows for a consideration of Asian and black subjectivities under the influence of Portuguese colonization, moving away from the primacy of British colonialism in postcolonial epistemologies. Skin brings attention to one of the world’s longest colonial histories and a history of African slavery outside of the Atlantic, by incorporating the arena of the Indian Ocean as part of that trade. Within this, gendered legacies of racialization are proven to be more than skin deep in accounting for resistance and survival.
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, American Studies, Portuguese Studies, Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Studies, and 10 moreAsian American Studies, Iberian Studies, Gender and Sexuality, History of Slavery, Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies, Michel Foucault, Angola, Black Atlantic, India, and Indo-Portuguese History
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‘Gay Globalization via Goa in My Brother... Nikhil’ examines the 2005 film, which was the first to have focused on homosexuality in India. Despite this claim, the film articulates gay subjectivity as emerging from a global, rights-based... more
‘Gay Globalization via Goa in My Brother... Nikhil’ examines the 2005 film, which was the first to have focused on homosexuality in India. Despite this claim, the film articulates gay subjectivity as emerging from a global, rights-based perspective, it is argued. Central to this analysis of the film is its setting in Goa which is employed as a site of liminality between ‘traditional’ India and global modernity. Goa is both cleaved to and from India as a whole by casting the former’s historical regionality through
a misconstrual of its religious identities, as well as through references to colonial and alleged racial difference. The film’s basis for such differentiation is considered as being in large part due to Goa’s longer colonization by the Portuguese in comparison to the reign of the British in most of the rest of India. Modernity and diaspora are also explored as key features of the representation of Goa in the film, especially as they tie in to issues of gay rights. Further, the essay scrutinizes the parallels between the title character and the real-life inspiration behind the film, the Goan AIDS activist Dominic D’souza. In concluding, it is made apparent that the film centres gay male subjectivity while relegating Goan identity to an ambivalent marginality.
a misconstrual of its religious identities, as well as through references to colonial and alleged racial difference. The film’s basis for such differentiation is considered as being in large part due to Goa’s longer colonization by the Portuguese in comparison to the reign of the British in most of the rest of India. Modernity and diaspora are also explored as key features of the representation of Goa in the film, especially as they tie in to issues of gay rights. Further, the essay scrutinizes the parallels between the title character and the real-life inspiration behind the film, the Goan AIDS activist Dominic D’souza. In concluding, it is made apparent that the film centres gay male subjectivity while relegating Goan identity to an ambivalent marginality.
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Despite its history as a favored destination for hippies from the West in the 1960s and 1970s, present-day party tourism in Goa largely attracts Indian travelers. This is a product of the post-1990s liberalization of the Indian economy,... more
Despite its history as a favored destination for hippies from the West in the 1960s and 1970s, present-day party tourism in Goa largely attracts Indian travelers. This is a product of the post-1990s liberalization of the Indian economy, coupled with the exoticization of Goa, which has rendered it a pleasure periphery to the subcontinent. Such difference, and attraction, occurs because, unlike most of the rest of the India that annexed Goa, the region was a Portuguese colony until 1961. Goa’s Lusitanization suggests a more liberal milieu, social gatherings with music and dancing being commonplace culturally, for example. While tourism has become an economic mainstay in Goa, the party economy pays little heed to Goans and their culture, treating the land as a place where fun is paramount and local concerns, including environmental ones, are sidelined.
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Graphic novella based on the life of Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar (1929-2021).
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Review of Colonial and Post-Colonial Goan Literature in Portuguese: Woven Palms (2019), edited by Paul Melo e Castro.